It is not too often that a release catches review sites by surprise, in the nature of good publicity
resellers and manufacturers try to give the reviewers enough time to thoroughly test the new hardware so that the review is ready to go when the NDA expires. The reviewers get to see the new kit early, but the trade is that they have to get all their testing done in a limited amount of time. Sometimes, kit arrives late, Murphy shows up, an NDA gets moved (or any of a number of other reasons) and the reviews come out scattered over a few days as opposed to all appearing within hour

One of our members has turned his hobby of collecting older electronic equipment and is finding about 10% of the motherboards that he tested before sending them off arrive dead. Do you have any ideas as to what might be killing the motherboards, or maybe you feel it's more likely user error?

Motherboards today sport onboard sound that rivals most current add in sound cards. They support HD audio, either 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound and usually a host of optical, SPDIF, component and other input and output choices. The higher end audio cards feature components usually only found previously in studio grade equipment. ExtremeTech feels that the audio quality possibilities beg an important question; why do speakers intended for PCs have to suck so much?

Good things come in packs of 24, and AMD's Istanbul can be included among that group. The Tech Report has pictures of a four socket system with four 6-core Istanbul processors, for a rather impressive task manager. Perhaps even more impressive is that with specific Socket F motherboards, a BIOS flash is all it will take to allow you to drop one of these new Istabul chips in for a hefty upgrade. Follow the link to see just how hefty.

[H]ard|OCP believes firmly that there can never be too much power, hence their review of a system with a pair of GeForce GTX 295s set up in Quad SLI. The installation was a snap, they had none of the problems that plagued SLI set
up in previous generations, problems which slowed the adoption of multiple graphics cards. If you can manage to provide the $1000 and 290W to your graphics cards, you will be playing games at 2560x1600 with every option maxed out and still have no fra

In the last half of March, users of XP and Vista will be able to try out the new Internet Explorer, with exciting new features like a "monetization ecosystem". While it is hard to know exactly what is meant by that phrase, Tech ARP makes a likely guess, it will have something to do with advertisements. The other focus of the update is searches, it sounds as though the web portal will be resurrected
once again. There are also some unspecified privacy and security improvements; we will see how wel

NVIDIA responded to a court filing in which Intel alleged that the four-year-old chipset license agreement the companies signed does not extend to Intel's future generation CPUs with "integrated" memory controllers, such as Nehalem. The filing does not impact NVIDIA chipsets that are currently being shipped. Intel is trying to delay the inevitable value shift from the CPU to the GPU.